I Get My Best Ideas While Driving

One of the questions that people often ask professional writers is "Where do you get your ideas?" I'm not at all sure I could answer that question myself, but I certainly could tell anyone "when" I get ideas--driving, especially driving distances. I put this into practice in an intentional fashion when I was working on my PhD in the mid-1990s and driving 60-70 miles each way to my community college part-time teaching job from the town where I was living and getting my graduate degree. I often laid out my time at the beginning of the trip like this: I'll spend 1/3 of my travel time thinking about the dissertation, 1/3 of my time working on the paper I'm going to present at a conference, and 1/3 of my time preparing what I'm going to say in my class. This worked out pretty well for a 1-1/2-hour commute on back roads followed by stop-and-go traffic into the city.
Now I don't get so many opportunities to brainstorm or draft while I'm driving, unless I'm making a special trip, because I commute under 10 miles to work. But it seems as if every time I'm on my way somewhere, I start to tell myself a story or craft a poem or plan some professional writing project. Yesterday, the urge to record some of my planning was so strong that I started writing myself notes in my cell phone, which doesn't offer a whole lot of space, but can be adequate for jotting down 3 chapter titles for a book, for example.
I think the stimulus of car time comes from the fact that I don't have a working CD player in the car, and I often find myself in areas in the mountains where I can't pick up much of NPR. But it's also been my quiet thinking time during many years of running around from campus to another when I was patching together part-time jobs and going home to a couple little kids and, later, patching together part-time jobs and getting a PhD and going home to a couple middle schoolers. So I turned off the radio and reflected.
This reflective time paid off when I'd sit down later to write--or when I'd walk into the classroom and start to address my class--because I'd really been writing and planning in the car, trying out ways of saying things, and the drafting experience seemed to work, even though those drafts never made it onto paper.
Over time, I came to expect to be flooded with great new ideas every time I got into the car and started off for an hour or more of driving time.
But that didn't come till I'd trained myself to use that time well--by promising myself I'd work on a particular writing problem and setting limits to the time I'd spend on it and making sure that I got to a notebook or computer sometime shortly after completing my drive so that I'd enjoy the fruits of my labor by actually producing the texts I'd been thinking about.
I think any activity would do. My daughter, a knitter, showed me an article about novelists who knit, who say that they can work their way through writing problems while they're knitting and that sitting down to knit can focus them on the problem-solving.
On one level this practice troubles me. I believe there's a great deal to be gained from mindfulness, from living in the moment and paying attention to the activity one is engaged in, and it is certain that I drive mechanically while I am in the throes of writing. On the other hand, I've been driving for 40 years, and it isn't something I have to pay full attention to in order to accomplish the task efficiently. I am happy to be mindful about kneading bread or even mowing the lawn, rather than off in the stratosphere with my thoughts.
And although I'd like to associate this kind of thinking with what William Golding called "grade-one thinking" in his often-anthologized essay, "Thinking as a Hobby," I have to admit that the quality of my thought isn't particularly earth-shattering, either when I'm mindful of mowing or I'm absent-mindedly driving: I'm usually just writing--just clothing some of the ideas I've held into a useful form for sharing with others, or even making up a story that will likely never make it to the computer screen. (I've started two different fantasy novels that I revisit mentally from time to time, feeling almost as if I were reading them--which seems to make writing them down superfluous.)
Most of all, I simply enjoy the activity of putting thoughts into words. I think of myself as being much like Dr. Johnson's "harmless drudge" of a lexicographer: what I do with words gives me mental exercise, hurts no one else, and garners no fame.
But since it has worked for me, I highly recommend it, especially when you are hard pressed for time to complete a writing task by deadline. Set yourself a goal and a time limit, get in your car, and think about your writing task while you drive through the countryside. Then, once you've reached your destination, sit down and get as much down on paper as you can. Let me know if it works!